Drug-resistant gonorrhoea on the rise

The sexually transmitted disease, which can lead to infertility in men and women, is treatable with antibiotics. But following recent resistance to the quinolone family of antibiotics in the US, UK and Australia, authorities in these countries now recommend cephalosporins, the only option besides quinolones.

In the latest setback, quinolone resistance seems to have spread to Canada. Kaede Ota and her colleagues at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto found that quinolone-resistant infections in Ontario soared from 4 per cent of infections in 2002 to 28 per cent in 2006 (Canadian Medical Association Journal, DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.080222). The team blames the surge on a mixture of unsafe sex and people not completing prescribed courses of antibiotics.

The fear is that strains resistant to all antibiotics will appear. The first cephalosporin-resistant strains appeared in 2008 in Japan.

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